Spider Tales (LP)


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Format: LP 
Label: Free Dirt Records 
Year: 2020 

Media Condition: New 
Sleeve/Cover Condition: New 
 
TRACKS: 

A1 Goodbye, Honey, You Call That Gone 
A2 Roustabout 
A3 Where Did You Sleep Last Night 
A4 Old-Timey Grey Eagle 
A5 Move, Daniel 
A6 Blackbird Says To The Crow 
A7 Brown Skin Baby 

B1 English Chicken 
B2 Rocky Road To Dublin 
B3 The Angels Done Bowed Down 
B4 Beyond This Wall 
B5 Boll Weevil 
B6 Done Gone 
B7 Mad Mama's Blues 

PERSONNEL: 

Jake Blount 
Tatiana Hargreaves 
Nic Gareiss 
Rachel Eddy 
Haselden Ciaccio 

Born and raised in Washington, DC, Jake Blount was also a 2020 artist-in-residence at Strathmore in Bethesda, during which time his amazing debut LP was released. 

Named for Anansi--the great trickster of Akan mythology--Spider Tales features fourteen carefully chosen tracks drawn from Blount's extensive research of Black and Indigenous music of the Chesapeake region. The result is an unprecedented testament to the voices paradoxically obscured yet profoundly ingrained into the Appalachian tradition. 

With a history of hardship and resistance coded into the music, Spider Tales brings out centuries of visceral feeling refracted again through the lens of Blount's own experience as an LGBTQ activist and key figure in an emerging wave of queer roots musicians. The album's sound is appropriately haunted-spinning through "crooked" instrumental tunes, modal keys, stark songs, and confounding melodic structures-and it's lyrics range from despairing to violent to downright apocalyptic. 

Blount is joined by his musical peers Tatiana Hargreaves, Nic Gareiss, Rachel Eddy, and Haselden Ciaccio on the album, which was produced by Jeff Claus and Judy Hyman (The Horse Flies). Altogether, Spider Tales is a beautiful, masterfully performed, and thematically intense first statement into the transforming canon of American roots music. 

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